This is mistitled... so I edited it to reflect what the article is saying.

Why having children [grows] a woman's brain as well as heart

DICK AHLSTROM, Science Editor

WOMEN OFTEN complain their ability to think and reason goes out the window after having a child, but in fact the opposite is true. A new study shows a woman’s brain actually grows after having a baby.

The results also show that the greatest brain growth occurs in women who are particularly enthusiastic about their newcomer.

The brain growth comes in specific areas, according to the study of 19 women who gave birth at Yale-New Haven Hospital and which is published this morning in Behavioural Neuroscience, a journal of the American Psychological Association.

Perhaps not surprisingly, growth occurred in areas specifically linked to the hallmark traits of motherhood. This included maternal motivation, reward and emotion processing, sensory integration and also in the front of the brain where reasoning and judgment take place, the report’s authors said.

The research team used the latest tissue scanning equipment to take images of the brain at two to four weeks after birth and then at three to four months.

This showed that “grey matter volume [the thinking part of the brain] increased by a small but significant amount”, they reported.

Continues @ IrishTimes.com